A Popular Illinois State Park Can’t Handle All Their Visitors

One of Illinois' most popular state parks says it can't handle all of the visitors they get.

Say what?

According to NewsTribune and WREX, Starved Rock State Park is having trouble with the over 10 million visitors they have had since 2014.

Kerry Novak the park's superintendent said that "the facilities and trails in Utica aren't equipped to handle the traffic they're seeing."

They've never before had to deal with a high volume of traffic in the park in fact Kerry said that "Five years ago, 10 years ago, you would not have seen this.” He said that now “there was no vegetation growing on the trails, but there was no trenching, either.”

The trenching or "gullies were formed by human feet", wearing down the trails from the numerous visitors.

On one hand it's great to know that the park is being used but on the other hand it's scary to realize that "Starved Rock is approaching a tipping point."

"The park’s facilities, especially the trails, are simply not capable of handling such continual punishment" without some sort of aid.

The park is faced with a few decisions on what to do if the state's budget issues are figured out.

They're looking at possibly limiting the amount of visitors in the park, raise fees on the park to help cut down on the traffic or maybe do both.

One way or another they need funds to properly maintain the park. Kerry says that "they need [the] money [for] manpower, vehicles and things like that."

Wow! I had no idea this was going on.

This state budget issue is effecting everything in our state.

It's shameful we can't get things hammered out and work together and get the right funds to to the right places.

It's terrible that now our state parks are forced to look at limiting their visitors or having to their raise fees because our government is squabbling over pretty much everything and things are slipping through the cracks that ought not to be.

I'd hate to see this happen to Starved Rock or any of state parks.

Just look at the beauty of this place and it's roughly an hour from us.